Advancing Accountability in Education

As a nation, we need every student reading and doing math on grade level. Annual assessment data on student academic performance is critical to inform parents, educators, and the public about how our schools are performing, and it helps to identify where research-based interventions are needed to ensure that all students can be successful.

Annual, comparable, statewide assessments also give state and district leaders and policymakers the ability to focus resources on problem areas, find strategies that work, and reward results. Without this information, decision-makers are forced to spend taxpayer money based on guesses and then hope for the best. Objective, comparable data and timely, transparent reporting of data will rightly keep the focus rightly on student success within the education system.

The Bush Institute has created a resource, the State of Our Cities report, that provides a starting point for understanding and using available data from multiple sources. Find information about your city’s school district or your local school with these easy-to-use report cards and turn data into action. The tool also includes data from our Global Report Card, which allows city scores with global competitors.

“Educators, parents, policymakers, and importantly, our mayors, need access to objective, comparable data so that they can make decisions to support the success of all students in their communities.” – Holly Kuzmich, Executive Director of the George W. Bush Institution.

Ensuring the Education of Our Nation’s Children

State of Our Cities: Profiles of Education Performance Around the Nation provides comparable education data on more than 100 cities across the country and allows users to make comparisons at the state, national, and global level so that mayors, policymakers, and the public can engage more vigorously in education decision-making in their local communities.

The data describes indicators including: a high-quality education for every student; supported pathways to college and career; early childhood education that prepares students for the classroom; and effective educators and principals.

State of Our Cities is the updated and enhanced version of the Mayors’ Report Card on Education, which covered education metrics for 33 cities and was first released in January 2015 at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting. While education data has been collected and aggregated at the state level, the Mayors’ Report Card was the first time that data was collected and aggregated at the city level.

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“I don’t think you can solve a problem if you can’t diagnose it, and I don’t think it is fair for parents or students not to be informed of how their schools perform relative to other schools and how their children perform relative to other children.” – President George W. Bush

“The Bush Institute is an exciting place: a place of learning, a place of scholarship, but most importantly, a place of action, a results-oriented institute that will have an effect on our country and, we think, on the world.”—President George W. BushSupport Our Work